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River Song – he kept saying that name. And the way he said it – I don't know why, but I found myself feeling jealous of her – it had to be a her.
I felt proprietary about the Doctor. My target. Though when I was little, I’d wanted to marry him.
He was dying, because of me. Because I did what I was programmed to do – kill the Doctor. I killed him with a kiss, with the poison of the Judas tree, because he let me, let me get close, because he trusted me – he never saw it coming.
But he didn't die, not right away. Even stopped to change! (The man does look hot in a tux.) He just kept fighting, kept caring – about saving Amy and Rory – about saving me. Why should he care so much about me?
Child of the TARDIS – what did he mean? What am I?
After that goddamn moron Hitler shot me, I changed, like I did that time in New York and ended up a toddler. I changed like the Doctor can. What a rush that is! (Though I suppose I won't be doing that ever again now. But I don't care – he was worth it. Plus I'm smoking hot – all mature-looking, and with hair that doesn't stop!)
But being inside the TARDIS – it felt so strange, and so right somehow. I just knew how to fly her. I felt it. She showed me how. I suppose the Doctor knew she would, so I could help save Amy and Rory.
But the Doctor was still dying. He barely had minutes left when he told Amy and Rory he needed to speak to me.
'Find her,' he said, when I got down very close to him. 'Find River Song...and tell her something from me.'
'Tell her what?' I asked.
And then he whispered in my ear, with his last breath.
Amy asked me what the Doctor said, but it wasn't for her to know – it was just for me. Just between him and me.
He said, 'Tell her - I love her.'
But... I'm her. River Song is me.
The Doctor loves me...?
Me? Of all people? Why would he say that? No one's ever told me they love me, not like that, and why should they?
He seems to know all about me.
I hardly know him – only what I was raised to think.
He's mad... and wonderful...
Amy was talking, but something was happening inside me. She told that death robot, the Teselecta, to show us River Song. And then there was my face – my new face. The woman I'd been feeling jealous of, the woman the Doctor had been calling for, pleading for her to help him, whose name he said with so much feeling, so much familiarity, as if he'd known her a long time – is me. The woman I will become.
I am becoming someone new – inside as well as out. A new self. My own self.
The Doctor said to find River Song. He meant for me to find her in myself – the woman I could be. He was telling me that I have a choice – that I can be more than what I've been, what I've been trained to be – someone else's tool – a psychopath who leaves mayhem and destruction in her wake. This River Song, whoever she is in my future, is someone the Doctor admires and trusts and cares for a great deal. Clearly.
I was raised to think he was a monster. But the man I saw fighting for his friends, and for the woman who'd poisoned him, who caused such pain and fear – that man was no monster. Even when he had to crawl, in pain and dying, he still refused to give up.
I've never seen anyone care that much. Impressive.
And when he spoke to me, he could have cursed me, heaped blame on me, told me he hated me for what I'd done. But he didn't. All he wanted was to help me, to make me see what he saw in me. To tell me I am loved.
I didn't have to be the woman who killed the Doctor. I could be the woman who saved him. He said no one could, but I knew I had to try.
I didn't really know what I was doing – I'd so little experience with that energy – but all I felt was joy. And a sense of freedom I've never felt before. I made the choice to bring him back. It was the right thing to do. Nearly burnt myself out, but I'd do it again, in a heartbeat.
I was awfully groggy in hospital, but I thought I heard the Doctor saying something about me being 'amazing.'
I'm beginning to think he is, too.